“All the time,” Chaney said. His back to the window, he hadn’t bothered to look around. “Cops can’t keep up with them anymore.”
“Why was Dickinson so interested in the Project?”
“Ed was a great man.” His face clouded somewhat, and I wondered if the port hadn’t drawn his emotions close to the surface. “You’d have had to know him. You and he would have got along fine. He had a taste for the metaphysical, and I guess the Project was about as close as he could get.”
“How do you mean?”
“Did you know he spent two years in a seminary? Yes, somewhere outside Philadelphia. He was an altar boy who eventually wound up in Harvard. And that was that.”
“You mean he lost his faith?”
“Yes. But he always retained that fine mystical sense of purpose that you drill into your best kids, a notion that things are somehow ordered. When I knew him, he wouldn’t have presumed to pray to anyone. But he had all the drive of a missionary, and the same conviction of—” He dropped his head back on the leather upholstery and tried to seize a word from the ceiling. “—destiny.
“Ed wasn’t like most physicists. He was competent in a wide range of areas. He wrote on foreign affairs for Commentary and Harper’s; he published books on ornithology, systems analysis, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Edward Gibbon.”
He swung easily out of his chair and reached for a pair of fat matched volumes in mud-brown covers. It was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the old Modern Library edition. “He’s the only person I’ve ever known who’s actually read the thing.” He turned the cover so that I could see the inscription:
For Hutch,
In the fond hope that we can hold off the potherbs and the pigs.
Ed
“He gave it to me when I left SETI.”
“Seems like an odd gift. Have you read it?”
He laughed off the question. “You’d need a year.”
“What’s the business about the potherbs and pigs?”
He rose and walked casually to the far wall. There were photos of naval vessels and aircraft, of Chaney and President Fine, of the Sandage complex. He seemed to screw his vision into the latter. “I don’t remember. It’s a phrase from the book. He explained it to me at the time. But …” He held his hands outward, palms up.
“Hutch,” I said, “thanks.” I got up to go.
“There’s nothing to it,” he said. “I don’t know where that thing came from, but Ed Dickinson would have given anything for a contact.”
“Hutch, is it possible that Dickinson might have been able to translate the text?”
“Not if you couldn’t. He had the same program.”
I don’t like cities.
Dickinson’s books were all out of print, and the used bookstores were clustered in Cambridge. Even then, the outskirts of Boston, like the city proper, were littered with glass and newspapers. Surly crowds milled outside bars. Windows everywhere were smashed or boarded. I went through a red light at one intersection rather than learn the intentions of an approaching band of ragged children with hard eyes. (One could scarcely call them children, though I doubt there was one over 12.) Profanity covered the crumbling brick walls as high as an arm could reach. Much of it was misspelled.
Boston had been Dickinson’s city. I wondered what the great humanist thought when he drove through these streets.
I found only one of his books: Malcolm Muggeridge: Faith and Despair. The store also had a copy of The Decline and Fall. On impulse, I bought it.
I was glad to get back to the desert.
We were entering a period of extraordinary progress, during which we finally began to understand the mechanics of galactic structure. McCue mapped the core of the Milky Way, Osterberger developed his unified field concepts, and Schauer constructed his celebrated revolutionary hypothesis on the nature of time. Then, on a cool morning in October, a team from Cal Tech announced an electrifying discovery: objects on the fringe of visibility were not receding; were, in fact, resisting expansion and moving slowly in our direction, against the tide. It seemed then, as it does now, that they are fragments of another universe.
In the midst of all this activity, we had an emergency one night in late September. Earl Barlow, who was directing the Cal Tech groups, suffered a mild heart attack. I arrived just before the EMTs, at about 2 AM.
After the ambulance left with him, Barlow’s men wandered about listlessly, drinking coffee, too upset to work. The opportunity didn’t catch me entirely unprepared. I gave Brackett his new target, and the numbers. The ululating shriek of the emergency vehicle had barely subsided before the parabolas swung round and fastened on the bright dog-star Procyon.
There was only the disjointed crackle of interstellar static.
I took long walks on the desert at night. The parabolas are lovely in the moonlight. Occasionally, the stillness is broken by the whine of an electric motor, and the antennas slide gracefully along their tracks. It was, I thought, a new Stonehenge of softly curving shapes and fluid motion.
The Muggeridge book was a slim volume. It was not biographical, but rather an analysis of the philosopher’s conviction that the West has a death wish. It was the old argument that God had been replaced by science, that man had gained knowledge of a trivial sort, and lost purpose.
It was, on the whole, depressing reading. In his conclusion, Dickinson took issue, arguing that truth will not wait on human convenience, that if man cannot adapt to a neutral universe, then that universe will indeed seem hostile. We must make do with what we have and accept truth wherever it leads. The modern cathedral is the radiotelescope.
Sandage was involved in the verification procedure for McCue’s work, and for the “enigmatic Cal Tech” objects. All of that is another story: what is significant is that it got me thinking about verifications, and I realized I’d overlooked something: there’d been no match for the Procyon recordings anywhere in the data banks since the original reception. But the Procyon recordings might themselves have been the confirmation of an earlier signal!
It took five minutes to run the search: there were two hits.
Both were fragments, neither more than 15 minutes; but there was enough of each to reduce the probability of error to less than one percent.
The first occurred just three weeks prior to the Procyon reception.
The second went back to 1987, a San Augustin observation. Both were at 40 gigahertz. Both had identical pulse patterns. But there was an explosive difference, sedately concealed in the target information line: the 1987 transmission had come while the radiotelescope was locked on Sirius!
When I got back to my office, I was trembling.
Sirius and Procyon were only a few light years apart. My God, I kept thinking, they exist! And they have star travel!
I spent the balance of the day stumbling around, trying to immerse myself in fuel usage reports and budget projections. But mostly what I did was watch the desert light grow hard in the curtains, and then fade. The two volumes of Edward Gibbon were propped between a Webster’s and some black binders. The books were thirty years old, identical to the set in Chaney’s den. Some of the pages, improperly cut, were still joined at the edges.
I opened the first volume, approximately in the middle, and began to read. Or tried to. But Ed Dickinson kept crowding out the Romans. Finally I gave it up, took the book, and went home.
There was duplicate bridge in town, and I lost myself in that for five hours. Then, in bed, still somewhat dazed, I attempted The Decline and Fall again.
It was not the dusty rollcall of long-dead emperors that I had expected. The emperors are there, stabbing and throttling and blundering. And occasionally trying to improve things. But the fish-hawkers are there too. And the bureaucrats and the bishops.
It’s a world filled with wine and legionnaires’ sweat, mismanagement, arguments over Jesus, and the inability to transfer power, all played out to the ruthless drumbeat of dissolution. An undefined historical t
ide, stemmed occasionally by a hero, or a sage, rolls over men and events, washing them toward the sea. (During the later years, I wondered, did Roman kids run down matrons in flashy imported chariots? Were the walls of Damascus defiled by profanity?)
In the end, when the barbarians push at the outer rim of empire, it is only a hollow wreck that crashes down.
Muggeridge must have been there.
And Dickinson, the altar boy, amid the fire and waste of the imperial city, must have suffered a second loss of faith.
We had an electrical failure one night. It has nothing to do with this story except that it resulted in my being called in at 4 AM (not to restore the power, which required a good electrician; but to pacify some angry people from New York; and to be able to say, in my report, that I had been on the spot).
These things attended to, I went outside.
At night, the desert is undisturbed by color or motion. It’s a composition of sand, rock, and star; a frieze, a Monet, uncomplicated, unchanging. It’s reassuring, in an age when little else seems stable: the orderly universe of the twentieth century had long since disintegated into a plethora of neutron galaxies, ‘colliding’ black holes, time reversals, and God knows what.
The desert is solid underfoot. Predictable. A reproach to the quantum mechanics that reflect a quicksand cosmos in which physics merges with Plato.
Close on the rim of the sky, guarding their mysteries, Sirius and Procyon, the bright pair, sparkled. The arroyos are dry at that time of year, shadowy ripples in the landscape. The moon was in its second quarter. Beyond the administration building, the parabolas were limned in silver.
My cathedral.
My Stonehenge.
And while I sat, sipping a Coors, and thinking of lost cities and altar boys and frequency counts, I suddenly understood the significance of Chaney’s last remark! Of course Dickinson had not read the text: that was the point!
I needed Chaney.
I called him in the morning, and flew out in the afternoon. He met me at Logan, and we drove out toward Gloucester. “There’s an excellent Italian restaurant,” he said. And then, without taking his eyes off the road: “What’s this all about?”
I’d brought the second volume with me, and I held it up for him to see. He blinked in apparent confusion.
It was early evening, cold, wet, with the smell of approaching winter. Freezing rain pelted the windshield. The sky was gray, heavy, sagging into the city.
“Before I answer any questions, Hutch, I’d like to ask a couple. What can you tell me about military cryptography?”
He grinned. “Not much. The little I do know is probably classified.” A tractor-trailer lumbered past, straining, spraying water across the windows. “What, specifically, are you interested in?”
“How complex are the navy’s codes? I know they’re nothing like cyrptograms, but what sort of general structure do they have?”
“First off, Harry, they’re not codes. Monoalphabetic systems are codes. Like the cryptograms you mentioned. The letter ‘G’ always turns up, say, as an ‘M.’ But in military and diplomatic cryptography, the ‘G’ will be a different character every time it appears. And the encryption alphabet isn’t usually limited to letters: we can use numbers, dollar signs, ampersands, even spaces.” We splashed onto a ramp and joined the Interstate. It was sufficiently raised that we looked across rows of bleak rooftops. “Even the shape of individual words is concealed.”
“How?”
“By encrypting the spaces.”
I knew the answer to the next question before I asked it. “If the encryption alphabet is absolutely random, which I assume it would have to be, the frequency count would be flat. Right?”
“Yes. Given sufficient traffic, it would have to be.”
“One more thing, Hutch: a sudden increase in traffic will alert anyone listening that something is happening even if he can’t read the text. How do you hide that?”
“Easy. We transmit a continuous signal, twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes it’s traffic, sometimes it’s garbage. But you can’t tell the difference.”
God have mercy on us, I thought. Poor Ed Dickinson.
We sat at a small corner table well away from the main dining area. I shivered in wet shoes and a damp sweater. A small candle guttered cheerfully in front of us.
“Are we still talking about Procyon?” he asked.
I nodded. “The same pattern was received twice, three years apart, prior to the Procyon reception.”
“But that’s not possible.” Chaney leaned forward intently. “The computer would have matched them automatically. We’d have known.”
“I don’t think so.” Half a dozen prosperous, overweight men in topcoats had pushed in and were jostling one another in the small entry. “The two hits were on different targets: they would have looked like an echo.”
Chaney reached across the table and gripped my wrist, knocking over a cup. He ignored it. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Are you suggesting there’s an empire out there?”
“I don’t think Ed Dickinson had any doubts.”
“Why would he keep it secret?”
I’d placed the book on the table at my left hand. It rested there, its plastic cover reflecting the glittering red light of the candle. “Because they’re at war,” I said.
Understanding broke across Chaney’s features. The color drained from his face, and it took on a pallor that was almost ghastly in the lurid light.
“He believed,” I continued, “he really believed that mind equates to morality, intelligence to compassion. And what did he find after a lifetime? A civilization that had conquered the stars, but not its own passions and stupidities.”
A tall young waiter presented himself. We ordered port and pasta.
“You don’t really know there’s a war going on out there,” Chaney objected.
“Hostility then. Secrecy on a massive scale, as this must be, has unhappy implications. Dickinson would have saved us all with a vision of order and reason … .”
The gray eyes met mine. They were filled with pain. Two adolescent girls in the next booth were giggling. The wine came.
“What has The Decline and Fall to do with it?”
“It became his Bible. He was chilled to the bone by it. You should read it, but with caution. It’s quite capable of strangling the soul. Dickinson was a rationalist; he recognized the ultimate truth in the Roman tragedy: that once expansion has stopped, decay is constant and irreversible. Every failure of reason or virtue loses more ground.
“I haven’t been able to find his book on Gibbon, but I know what he’ll say: that Gibbon was not writing only of the Romans, nor of the British of his own time. He was writing of us … .
“To anyone who thinks in those terms, who looks around him, this world is fast sliding toward a dark age.”
We drank silently for a few minutes. I had the sense that time had locked in place, that we sat unmoving, the world frozen around us.
“Did I tell you,” I said at last, “that I found the reference for his inscription? He must have had great respect for you, Hutch.” I opened the book to the conclusion, and turned it for him to read:
The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of potherbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes.
Chaney stared disconsolately at me. “It’s all so hard to believe. He always seemed so optimistic.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I think the reverse is true. A man can survive a loss of faith in the Almighty, provided he does not also lose faith in himself. That was Dickinson’s real tragedy: he came to believe exclusively in radiotelescopes, the way some people do in religions.”
The food, when it came, went untasted. “What are you going to do, Harry?”
“About the Procyon text? About the probability that we have quarrelsome neighbors? I’m not afraid of that kind of information; all it means is that w
here you find intelligence, you will probably find stupidity. Anyway, it’s time Dickinson got credit for his discovery.” And I thought, maybe it’ll even mean a footnote for me.
I lifted my glass in a mock toast, but Chaney did not respond. We faced each other in an uncomfortable tableau. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Thinking about Dickinson?”
“That too.” The candle glinted in his eyes. “Harry, do you think they have a SETI project too?”
“Possibly. Why?”
“I was wondering if your aliens know we’re here. This restaurant isn’t much further from Sirius than Procyon is. Maybe you better eat up.”
CONNIE WILLIS
The Sidon in the Mirror
Here’s an absorbing and elegant story—set in an unusual mining town on a very strange new world—that suggests that the deadliest kind of mirror is that which shows us ourselves most clearly …
As a writer, Connie Willis has made a very big name for herself in a very short period of time. Last year she won two Nebula Awards, one for her superb novelette “Fire Watch,” and one for her poignant short story “A Letter from the Clearys”; a few months later, “Fire Watch” went on to win her a Hugo Award as well. Her short fiction has appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy Science & Fiction, The Berkley Showcase, Galileo, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first novel, written in collaboration with Cynthia Felice, was Water Witch. She is currently working on her first solo novel (which she assures us will not be the first part of a trilogy), tentatively entitled The Bear in the Woods. Upcoming is a collection of her short fiction, Fire Watch and Other Stories, from Bluejay Books. Willis lives in Woodland Park, Colorado, with a husband, a fourteen-year-old daughter, and a bulldog.
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